It's All About The Starcrossed Lovers
by JanetBanana
Summary: From the First Five Lines Ficathon. A collection of Dasey and Lizwin oneshots.
1. Chapter 1

So I finally made my way back over to the Rivalry is Love livejournal after a bit, and found out about the First Five Lines Ficathon. I picked about six or seven that I really liked, and this short one shot is my first one. I'm just going to package all my ficathon one shots in one big story, each a chapter. This one is set during season 3. There are mild spoilers/references from "It's Our Party" and "Misadventures in Babysitting", slightly more from "Don't Take a Tip From Me" and "Show Off Tune".

_**Edwin had never worn cologne before.**_

That was basically the offhand comment that I had overheard Nora make to Dad last night after she caught a whiff of me.

It was just another sign that I was in danger. Just another rebellion against Derek and Casey, right? But stealing Derek's cologne? I don't even wear clean clothes half the time. What was I doing? And whatever it was, what did it have to do with the way Lizzie was acting? She was doing this with me, you know? Was that some of Casey's makeup she'd put on? And did you _see_ how she lifted her shirt up to show me the other one? That's a sign too. Because she's been really flirty lately. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't noticed the way she shakes her hips when she walks out of the room, or mentions things at the dinner table that only I would understand. I always laugh, and then everyone else looks around like they want to know the joke, but we never tell them.

Back when Dad and Nora first got married, she was quiet and she did as she was told. She's changed too, for the better. She'd joined up with Casey without question, and I thought "she needs to stand up for herself". But now? Now she's taken her _cues_ from Casey, getting passionately angry when someone (ironically, usually Casey herself) does her wrong. I can't say that doesn't get me just a little worked up, either. If you know what I mean. And now whenever she does team up, its _always_ with me.

And thank goodness the only time we were ever "caught" in the games closet together was when we were hiding from our party, or that time with Teddy. If they realized how much time we spent in there, alone, together, we'd be under intense scrutiny. I guess it's nice that Derek and Casey are so good at keeping our parents attention.

But do I really want to actively pursue this? I can think of a thousand reasons not to. It's not 'socially acceptable'. Neither of us is good at keeping secrets, and we'd probably lose a lot of friends if we went public. There will have to be a talk with our parents about it. Which could turn out really badly. And who knows what Derek and Casey would do? Marti would be on our side. At least until Derek or Dad told her it was wrong. If they did think that.

What about Lizzie? What if I'm just seeing what I want to see? But I'm not. You know she wrote a poem for Ms. McCabe's class, too. I didn't get to see all of it, but I could tell it was about me. Especially when our teacher was acting so suspiciously, and pulled her aside to ask questions that Lizzie didn't look like she particularly wanted to answer.

And what about my mom and Lizzie's dad? How will they react? What if Dad and Nora sent us to live with them? And we're so young. Even I admit that at our age, this whole thing will be a lot harder to defend than if we were Derek and Casey's age.

And they're no help, either. I'm pretty positive they have these same thoughts on a daily basis, but their ability to fight it out steps in any time they need it to. And of course, they really have more to lose. Derek is Mr. Popular, Casey is Miss Goody-Two-Shoes, and both of them seem to think the social and parental results they'd expect are too much to handle, so they stay apart.

I, on the other hand, can't find a single expected result that would make me learn to fight with Liz to stay away. Because it's there. It's impossible to deny. Do I really want to actively pursue this? Yeah. I definitely do.


	2. Chapter 2

A/N: This was the first of the prompt lines that jumped out at me, and it didn't take me long to find a plot for this one, either. Hope you like it. Also, take T rating seriously. This plotline basically revolves around sex. Nothing really explicit, but it's obvious what is going on.

_**Soap bubbles filled the room, and they would most likely be in tremendous trouble later, but all they could do at this very moment…was laugh.**_

It had been Casey's idea. They'd both been really turned on lately. The walls in this house were rather thin. You didn't partake in noise-making activities unless you planned to be okay with someone coming to see what you were up to. The random, rare times when they'd snuck off and found a way to be alone were not coming often enough for them. She wanted, no, needed, to be with him, with finals coming up, colleges sending out letters that held the key to her future. Their future. It was hard enough wondering about her own acceptances, but to deal with whether he would get into any of the schools she'd gotten into, was wearing her nerves thin. The emotional stress reliever, and physical too, of sex, was becoming a necessary distraction which she couldn't have.

Until she'd had the idea. There was a closet behind the laundry room. The washer was old. Very old and very loud. To enhance her disguise, she'd added some overalls, and some shirts with metal hardware. A bathing suit with metal rings. No matter that she hadn't worn some of the stuff for eight months. No one would go looking to see _what_ was in the laundry making so much noise. They slipped into the closet to have some fun. Together they'd come to a climax, and, in no mood to leave their cozy hideaway, were whispering quietly to each other. That is, until they heard Edwin's voice. "What the hell happened in here?"

Apparently, in his excitement, Derek had added about half a box of detergent to the washer. As they'd quickly dressed and left the closet to face Edwin, they'd found the laundry room flooded with soap bubbles. In their post-coital glow, they couldn't find it in themselves to do anything but laugh.

"What's so funny?"

"You wouldn't understand, bro." Derek had said with a wink in Casey's direction..

"What were you two doing in there? Wait. Oh geez. What you were "doing" was each other, right?"

They blushed furiously, no other answer needed.

"Well then you should probably be glad that this isn't the only closet in the house where MacDonald's and Venturi's, uh, communicate without using their words, shouldn't you?" he'd said, barely finishing his return wink before he barreled out of there, too afraid of the response to stay.

Well, they'd been wrong. They weren't in tremendous trouble. At least not this time. And Edwin and Lizzie were happy to know that they weren't going to begrudge them the same happiness.


	3. Chapter 3

A/N: I'm not completely crazy about the way this one turned out, some of the writing seems a little weak.Tell me what you think, anyway.

_Marti Venturi knew a lot of secrets._

Like the secret that when George kissed Nora at the wedding, it was not the first Venturi she'd seen kiss a MacDonald. They'd all been introduced about six months before the wedding. Four months after the introductions, at the beginning of the summer, George and Nora had taken them on a vacation. She supposed they figured it would help the learning to live together go more smoothly if they'd spent some time together first. So off they'd gone to a water park for a week. While George and Nora were in the food line, and Lizzie and Edwin were scoping out tables that would seat seven, Marti had skipped off to the lockers to grab some sunscreen. She'd walked into the darker corner where the locker was located, to find a couple of teenagers standing in front of it, kissing. She'd cleared her throat, hoping to break them apart so she could get the locker open, when she realized that one of them was Smerek. Well, she wasn't really too surprised to find him making out with someone. Then she saw the person he was kissing. She really hadn't thought anything of it. Derek liked kissing pretty girls, Casey was a pretty girl. When Derek saw her tear her gaze from him and set it on Casey, though, he'd scooped her up and explained that she had to keep this a secret. The first of many.

Edwin's relationship with Lizzie surprised her a lot more. At the time she'd learned of it, she'd become very used to keeping Derek and Casey's secret. She'd figured out, after begging Derek to explain it all to her, just why it was such a hush-hush thing. So when she saw Edwin installing a lock on the door to the games closet, she'd become intrigued that it might mean her little "family secret" might be getting bigger. She'd forced Edwin to explain what he needed a lock on the door for. This time she'd been whisked to the attic and he'd pleaded with her to pretend like she didn't know anything about it. She'd agreed on the condition that he explain why he needed a lock. He explained that his and Lizzie's meetings in there were recently becoming something that shouldn't be interrupted. He'd made her keep quiet about that too. It was all just another creative rule for the secret game she played.

Casey, for her part, would let Marti come to her and talk about any secrets involving her and Derek that might not fit together. At first, it had been hard to understand why they seemed to hate each other half the time. She'd graciously explained just how at first they'd only been attracted to each other physically, which Marti only took as fact, rather than try to understand. That was a concept only those who'd been through puberty could really grasp. She'd continued on in saying once they discovered how much they liked each other on mental and emotional levels, they'd had to keep up the act, to keep the secret. Marti liked these kinds of secrets the best: they made her feel like a grown up. Once during class, she'd been asked to write a creative story, so she wrote about a secret relationship where the couple appeared to hate each other on the outside. Standard formula, maybe, since she didn't mention anything about them being stepsiblings, or anything, but she managed to impress the teacher, because it sounded like it was written by someone twice her age. Perhaps because she saw it and focused less on making a story up, but rather taking the secrets out of the secret. Later, when her teacher asked her how she'd come up with the story, she'd simply said "oh, you know, Daddy let me have an ice cream cone before bed last night, I had some strange dreams." Which, surprisingly, her teacher believed.

When Casey got word that she and Derek would be eligible for a trip to New York, in exchange for appearing at an acceptance organization's conference during their senior year, after joining an online community for stepsibling lovers, Marti heard the news first and last. She even let Marti help her come up with reasons why Casey and Derek would be traveling together, and when Casey offered to make Marti a part of the trip and a valid reason, Marti got really excited.

Casey had "won" (bought) tickets to _Cats_, and she could never see _Cats_ without Marti, it wouldn't be fair. And of course, Marti would _never_ leave the country without Derek. So the three went off and stayed with Dennis for a week, who never knew what was really up.

Lizzie told her one time that when Edwin had confessed he'd told someone, and she'd gotten angry, that his answer, that it was Marti, was the only thing that calmed her down. She'd felt that of anyone they knew, Marti would be the only one who could keep the secret, and also the only one who might truly understand.

_Marti Venturi was worried._

She, Edwin, and Lizzie were sitting in the attic on the sofa Edwin had bought when he'd surpassed his yearly savings goal. For the first time, Edwin had let his trademark arm slung around Lizzie's shoulder turn into a full blown squeezing hug coupled with a whispered conversation in front of a family member, after she'd burst into tears about something. Following this incident, when Casey began making her suspicions known, talk among the three had gone in the direction of coming clean to her. Marti realized, that while Casey and Derek would understand, that things would change. She wasn't sure how she felt about this. And then of course, if the two came clean, once she'd had the opportunity to involve Derek, they would tell the two of their own relationship. But Edwin and Lizzie were not swayed by this. They decided to tell her. She came home from dance rehearsals, and they were all three lined up on her bed, hands primly in their laps, backs straight, appearing for all the world like innocent little angels. She'd seemed confused, but her face quickly changed to expectant, knowing something was up. "Well?" she'd asked. And then it had all come out. As the words tumbled nervously about the room, Casey had just smiled demurely, asked them to wait for a moment, then retrieved the only MacDonald-Venturi child not present. They had reciprocated the confession, and soon thereafter, the five had torn down walls, and created a support structure.

_Marti Venturi was jealous._

In only six months, the four had gotten very lazy about hiding themselves around the house. When George and Nora would leave them alone for the whole weekend, Sunday night and Monday would be what Marti saw as major risks. She didn't mind them being lovey-dovey during those weekends, and when things would become intense, she would just go next door and hang out with Dimmy. But when George and Nora got home, she thought they needed to be locked in "detox" rooms, until they could control themselves around them. On one such particular weekend, Casey held one of her "family meetings". She'd suggested they come clean. Lizzie had thought she meant to George and Nora, but she said she wanted to stop lying to everyone. She wanted all those girls to stop hanging all over Derek, and she wanted people to know she didn't care what they thought. Derek of course, didn't seem to mind the girls hanging on him, and he did care what people thought. They were in college now, though, and there weren't as many close minded people as there used to be. Marti was appalled. If they told everyone, things would be different. George and Nora would kick Derek and Casey out of the house, and send Edwin and Lizzie off to live with their other parents, she was sure. They'd probably take out their anger on her, and she'd have no one to go to. She tried to voice her concerns, but when Casey doesn't want to lie anymore, she can't really be swayed. So that Sunday night, the four oldest sat, waiting in the living room for George and Nora to arrive. Marti watched from the top step of the stairs, not wanting them to know she'd known about this for years. In a couple of short hours, they'd told them, George and Nora had gone downstairs to talk, and then come back to say that they'd be lying if they said they hadn't seen this coming, and they weren't going to stop them. Though Marti was relieved her theory hadn't rung true, she was still disappointed. Later that week, Ed and Liz had become the high schools favorite couple to talk about, and Casey and Derek came clean online to all their old schoolmates, causing MySpace and Facebook comment sections to become littered with gossip.

_Marti Venturi has no more secrets to keep._

At first she'd been disappointed, but now, she felt free. And a few years later when she'd heard the rumors, which were completely unfounded, that she was a lesbian, because apparently "MacDonald's and Venturi's don't "do" normal relationships" she'd just rolled her eyes. The gossip meant nothing anyway. Of course they did normal relationships, as much as anyone else did. Normal was such a relative word.

A/N: I'm not a fan of "Derek and Casey get together before George and Nora's wedding" plots, but it just fit the direction I took the story. So if it seems unlike me, it is.


End file.
